Thank you, Chair.
Thank you for the excellent presentations. I really appreciate when you come with solutions to some of the problems that we're addressing. I found it interesting that our witnesses talked about the fact that we have the science. I would agree with you, but what concerned me in the previous panel—I don't know if you had a chance to hear—was that for every question we asked the minister, the answer was, “Sure, we have the science, but these are geopolitical issues, so we're not going to do these things.” It worries me a great deal that we are making decisions based on geopolitics rather than standing up for the science and the regulations and the protocols that we have here in Canada. I think there is a deeper cultural issue within this government that needs to be addressed.
Mr. McCann, you made an interesting point in one of your recommendations, which was to appoint a regulatory ombudsman. In the previous Conservative government, we had a redress officer within CFIA, whom the Liberal government eliminated.
Would that redress officer be similar to what you're recommending in terms of this ombudsman? As I remember from the statistic previously, about a quarter of the complaints to the redress officer were justified and needed to be resolved, which gave accountability to the CFIA. Would this be a similar role, or would it be different?